Wednesday, 8 July 2015

New ACPI table tests in fwts 15.07.00

The Canonical Hardware Enablement Team and myself have been working on some significant improvements and changes to the Firmware Test Suite15.07.00 over the past several weeks. This cycle has been focused on adding more ACPI table testing support:

1. Added ACPI table tests:

BERT (Boot Error Record Table)

BGRT (Boot Graphics Resource Table)

BOOT (Boot Table)

CPEP (Corrected Platform Error Polling Table)

CSRT (Core System Resource Table)

DBG2 (Debug Port Table 2)

DBGP (Debug Port Table)

ECDT (Embedded Controller Boot Resources Table)

ERST (Error Record Serialization Table)

FACS (Firmware ACPI Control Structure)

HEST (Hardware Error Source Table)

LPIT (Low Power Idle Table test)

MSDM (Microsoft Data Management Table)

SLIC (Software Licensing Description Table)

SLIT (System Locality Distance Information)

SPCR (Serial Port Console Redirection Table)

SPMI (Service Processor Management Interface Description Table)

SRAT (System Resource Affinity Table)

TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance Capabilities Table)

UEFI (UEFI Data Table)

WAET (Windows ACPI Emulated Devices Table)

XENV (Xen Environment Table)

2. Moved the following tests out of the generic "acpitables" test into their own ACPI table tests:

FADT (Fixed ACPI Description Table)

HPET (HPET IA-PC High Precision Event Timer Table)

GTDT (GTDT Generic Timer Description Table)

MADT (Multiple APIC Description Table)

RSDP (Root System Description Pointer)

RSDT (Root System Description Table)

SBST (Smart Battery Specification Table)

XSDT (Extended System Description Table)

3. Updated ACPICA to version 20150616 and also 20150619 (ACPICA is used for the assembler/dissassembler and execution engine).

4. Renamed the --uefi and --acpi options to --uefitests and --acpitests respectively.

This release also incorporates some important bug fixes too, such making the acpidump dump file loading parser more robust, updating the SMM Communication fields on the UEFI table and fixing a segfault in the regular expression kernel log scanner on 32 bit systems.

For the next release of fwts, we are planning to continue to add table more tests from ACPI 5.x and ACPI 6.0 to get full coverage.

As ever, like all releases, for more details please consult the change log and the release notes.